• The sun is not out, or very weak, and you want to run a water-pump for an hour for your vegetable garden as example. • There was 2 days of overcast weather, causing your battery capacity to be low. Let the generator run for an hour or so to top-up capacity to see you through the night. • It was cloudy for 2 days and you must use the dishwasher, but you do not want to drain the batteries any further. Run the generator for the time the dishwasher will be on. Any spare capacity will also be directed to charging the batteries a bit. When the generator is on, it supplies 220V directly to the house. The invertor normally switches to bypass mode. As was the case with the invertor section, a 5kW generator must be considered to give you 2.5kW power as a reasonable maximum. You will hear the generator taking strain even at 50% load. If there is spare capacity in the generator, it will normally be directed to charging the batteries. Do not be fooled that switching on the generator for an hour will give your batteries a super quick charge.
